Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, September 21, 1993 TAG: 9309210050
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Kathy Loan
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
At the meeting, she listened to a woman asking for volunteers for Operation Santa Claus, a program that provides Christmas gifts to patients in mental hospitals.
After she left, she felt guilty about sitting through the program and having time on her hands. So she called the woman and asked what she could do to help.
She learned about a new program called the Mental Health Association Social Club that provided a warm atmosphere for former mental patients. She agreed to be a driver, helping get the participants to the meeting.
The first time she picked up people, she simply dropped them off at the meeting and went to the library. The next meeting, she decided to go inside and see what it was all about.
That was 14 years ago. Helen still drives people to the meetings, but now she is the director of the club.
The people there are not very different from you and me, she said. They need someone to talk to, someone to listen.
"I needed someone to need me," she said. "It's a two-way street."
The club was established in the 1970s when many people were released from mental hospitals after medicinal advances were made for schizophrenia and other mental illnesses.
The club provides conversation, good food, bingo games and general support.
"Everybody in the club is like everybody else. They don't have to deal with differences," Sawder said.
"We just listen."
Volunteers for the social club pick people up to bring them to the meetings, which are on the second and fourth Thursdays at St. Paul's United Methodist Church in Christiansburg.
The social club was one of several highlighted programs during the Montgomery County-Radford United Way Day of Caring.
Sawder said the club does receive some United Way funding, but saves the money for special events. Volunteers bring refreshments to the meetings, paying for them out of their own pockets. The United Way money is used for bus trips and special holiday dinners.
People like Sawder often work behind the scenes with little or no recognition for the work they do, the contributions they make to bettering someone's life.
During the Day of Caring, several United Way volunteers got a taste of what people like Sawder see everyday.
Lucy Draper, a Realtor with Owens & Co., spent a day at the New River Valley Workshop in Radford. The workshop runs training programs, provides support services and employs mentally disabled people. Draper and other volunteers helped the workers - who include nondisabled people - as they packaged samples of denture cleaner to be shipped to nursing homes and other places.
Draper, who had never worked on an assembly line, was impressed by the hard work the clients completed.
Brenda Branscome, who works at Federal Mogul, spent her Day of Caring hours with the Radford Clothing Bank. She was impressed by a young mother who came to help sort and fold clothing while holding an infant with one arm. The mother was a client of the clothing bank. The clothing bank recently helped send 116 Radford children back to school with new jeans, shirts and socks.
Cam McLaughlin, who works at Medical Diagnostic Services, spent his time at the New River Valley Free Clinic packaging pharmaceutical samples. The clinic, he learned, provides $1 million in health care with only a $135,000 budget.
People often think of fund-raising organizations as huge, impersonal creatures that have lost sight of why they were created in the first place.
In our local United Way's case, that will not happen as long as there are people like Sawder, Draper, Branscome and McLauglin to remind us why our help is needed.
Kathy Loan is a New River Valley bureau staff writer.
by CNB